5 minute read
STRUGGLE AND TRIUMPH
AROUND THE COMMUNITY
FRANCES PRINCE (DAVID’S DAUGHTER)
David Prince should have died, along with other members of his family.
But now, at 96 – 61 years after surviving the Holocaust and arriving in Melbourne – he has made a valuable contribution to the Australian Jewish community.
David was born into a lower middleclass family in Lodz, Poland. Until the age of 14 he enjoyed a carefree childhood with his twin brother Heniek and his parents Frymet and Israel. As David tells school students visiting the Jewish Holocaust Centre, his pre-war life consisted of, “hanging around other kids, skating in winter, soccer in summer, running 400m and 800m races, indoor gym and chatting up girls.” This last activity always gets a snigger from his young audience.
David’s uncomplicated and idyllic youth abruptly ended with the German invasion of Poland and the start of the Second World War. This kick-started the mandated wearing of the yellow star and the forced and forceful shifting into the confines of the Lodz Ghetto. He attempted to continue his education as long as possible. Then followed the allocation of workplaces, violence, food shortages, overcrowding and resultant illnesses and deaths. Within these broad brushstrokes of the experiences of the nearly quarter of a million Jews of Lodz, David, Heniek, Israel and Frymet clung together.
Frymet worked in Klugman’s carpet factory, making carpets out of rags for the German nation. Israel firstly worked cleaning bricks from partially destroyed buildings and then landed a far better job, indoors, draughting building plans for the ghetto. (The contents of those plans were never clear to David.) David and Heniek worked at an electrotechnical shop. They operated lathes to rewind electrical motors. “We were repairers. We were not producers. We didn’t make anything, we just fixed things. I was good with my hands,” David said.
All who survived the Lodz Ghetto remember the eight days in September 1942 that became known as the “szpera” (pronounced “shpera”). It traumatised and haunted all who were there. Every street and every building was suddenly blockaded and the entire population was told to assemble for a selection. Anybody who looked too old, too young, or too sick was separated and taken away, as we now know, to the Chelmno death camp. The remainder were told to return to their homes. So, home they went. Some without a mother, some without a father, some without their children. “During that event I lost my nana and cousins,” David said.
By August 1944, the Lodz Ghetto was the last ghetto remaining in Europe. All the others had been “liquidated”. The 60,000 remaining Jews of Lodz were slated to be deported to AuschwitzBirkenau.
David, Heniek, Israel and Frymet were on the last cattle-car train at the end of August that year. They weren’t supposed to be on that train at all.
David’s small family of four was meant to be part of a group of 500 (which eventually grew to more than 800 people) ordered to stay … not to be spared death, but death at AuschwitzBirkenau.
The boss of the electrotechnical department where David and Heniek worked gathered all his labourers and their families to be the ones to stay behind and “clean up” the ghetto. This referred to the task of sorting through every room in every apartment in every building, collecting items that could be of use to the Germans. These belongings of the murdered Jews of Lodz were sent to Germany.
David remembers distinctly what happened. “We all ended up sleeping at the factory for only one night. Some ‘toughs’, some low-lifes, maybe like mafia, came in. They threw us and others out of the building and took our places. And so, we were put on the next, the last, train to Auschwitz-Birkenau.”
The horrendous cattle-car train journey, the disorientation and horrifying violence upon arrival at AuschwitzBirkenau and the wrenching separation from beloved family members is familiar to nearly everyone from Lodz who survived until liquidation. And so, this was David and his family’s experience too. His intact nuclear family was in complete shock at the brutal reception they received upon arrival. Ferocious bellowing accompanied the vicious emptying of the cattle cars’ human cargo. David grimaces while describing the scene. “Sheer hell broke loose. Raus! Raus! (Out! Out!). It happened so quickly that I couldn’t really understand what was going on.”
The separation from his mother was hasty, chaotic and fierce. David, Heniek and Israel were sent to the right and Frymet, linking arms with their elderly neighbour, Mrs Frankel, was sent to the left. “My mum was 47. She wasn’t old. She may have been able to survive Birkenau,” David said.
Only recently has David talked about the possibility that had his mother not been arm-in-arm with elderly Mrs Frankel, and assisting her, she may have been selected to live, at least at that early stage. Maybe her kindness came at the ultimate price.
Israel, David and Heniek spent one week in Auschwitz-Birkenau. A call for metal workers rang out across the fields of thousands of men. David grabbed Israel and Heniek and put up their hands to demonstrate that they were, indeed, metal workers. They were chosen, but unsure for what. It was then, on their way out of Auschwitz-Birkenau, that they faced a selection. Selections upon arrival are well known. But they faced a selection upon departure. David’s intuition told him to lie about his and Heniek’s ages. To this day, he can’t explain what motivated him. He told his brother quickly, “Let’s change our birth dates. I’ll make myself older and you make yourself younger.” They were twins. He had no idea that being twins in Joseph Mengele’s Birkenau was not a good thing.
David Prince – a life of Struggle and Triumph
They were transported to the Friedland labour camp where they made parts for airplane propellers. Liberation came on 8th May 1945. As David always laments, “on the very last day of the war.”
A few months later the three of them made their way to Regensburg in Germany. Then David went to Munich. Under the most unlikely and little-known circumstances, David became a university student at the venerated and grandiose-sounding Ludwig Maximilian University. But that is a different story.
